Clarke Smith

Pzena Investment Management

Our investment philosophy is simple: we seek to buy good businesses at low prices. We focus exclusively on companies that are underperforming their historically demonstrated earnings power, performing fundamental, bottom-up research on these companies in an effort to determine whether the problems that caused the earnings shortfall are temporary or permanent. We typically consider companies for inclusion in the portfolio when the following criteria are met: (1) the current valuation is low compared to the company's normalized earnings power; (2) the current earnings are below historic norms; (3) problems are viewed as temporary; (4) management has a viable strategy to generate earnings recovery; and (5) there is meaningful downside protection in case the earnings recovery does not materialize. We believe a concentrated portfolio exclusively focused on companies with these characteristics should generate meaningful excess returns for long-term investors.